Speaker 1: All right, well it’s just my first event with trying this stuff, so I’ve got a lot of things I’m trying out for the first time today. So that means something is bound to go wrong. Well, thank you for inviting your friends over to this event. All right, so I’ll start off with the jingle. Okay, so everybody welcome.

This is podcast episode number 14 coming to you live from within second life in the Woodbridge sim. Here we go. All right. This is blue hair. This is my podcast live in second life. That was Jeff Smith. I had him make a jingle for my podcast.

So you may actually know about him. Okay, so basically I would like to talk a little bit about marketing and search engine optimization and just things that I’ve been working on to get my business up to date, or at least get people to know about it. I don’t know how much everybody here knows about marketing. So if you want to just chime in, you know, just say something or type something in text chat and I’ll let you have the floor or whatnot. Okay, so let me get my little slide presentation going. And I put together a few slides to get for what I’ve been looking at.

And it’s mostly, let me get out of my coffee. Basically, these are guidelines I’ve been looking at. I don’t follow them to a tee. It’s just I look at them and try and get my ideas across and start doing things. And the most things that I’ve worked on is diversifying my advertising.

And I just figured more places I start advertising and the more ways I advertise, the more people I start to get feedback from. Not everything works. In fact, a lot of things don’t work because second life is more of a niche market right now. And it really depends on what you’re selling and does it appeal to a customer or not.

And when you’re dealing with a niche market to begin with, and then you’re targeting a smaller market within that market, you start running into some really heavy limitations. I mean, my understanding right now is that probably the clothing and entertainment industry in second life is probably the best bet with clubbing. And just people don’t really own that much land or businesses. It’s really people just live their second life here. So because I am not a clothing designer, I don’t really believe that I have a greater market in second life. It’s a very small audience that I’m targeting. So I’ve been trying different things.

Speaker 2: Oh, cool. Thank you. No trick.

Speaker 1: Basically, I started paying for advertising. You may have seen some of my ads in the AvisDAR or you may not. I’ve been advertising with the SL marketing folks and there’s also a SL universe that start advertising with them. There’s also been a spot on the SL cable network. You may have seen me on the shopping channel.

Of course, you may not have seen me at all. The real key is trying to figure out where your small customer base is, where people are looking, where their eyes are looking. And that’s why I keep jumping from so many different advertising ideas. One of the things I found most helpful usually is word of mouth. And to get that, you really have to start interacting with your customers.

Not just your customers, but people that you know and even people that you don’t know that are around you. And when you start interacting with them, you’re actually advertising yourself because they become knowledgeable about a person. And eventually they may even find out that you’re knowledgeable in other technologies. They might not need those technologies, but somebody else may need them. And that’s where you start working with your networking. So word of mouth is probably the best advertising after that I’ve seen out there so far. Because people really trust their friends and they trust people who talk to them. And you know, it’s not an advertisement blow off.

I have multiple storefronts. This is something that started up recently. I used to have a lot of them before until I got my SIM. And when I got my SIM sent, then there was the whole thing where the marketing economy pretty much died over the summer and spring. So it’s been actually coming back up again.

So there’s a lot of things that happen. That’s how I measure my performances. Am I selling enough? Am I seeing a lot of people come by?

Am I getting questions from people about what my services and products do? Event volunteering. I’ve volunteered for the Relay for Life this past year. I was with the Creepy kind of quest team. And we did a lot of pretty cool stuff. I was responsible for a scavenger hunt that people looked for records around their campsite. And I guess I said everything about those except for social networking and what that’s involved with is all these social networking sites like Twitter, YouTube, SLBuzz.

Everything that’s out there. I try and get an account and provide some kind of content that people know about me. Because the more that people see you appear at different areas, the more confidence and trust that they start to see in a brand that you’re starting to provide.

I’ll just go into the mix. Slyingless somebody has a question about advertising and stuff. Life for You TV. I think I tried that before. I had problems with it. I pretty much settled on YouStream TV. But I’m having problems streaming in the world right now. Drax repress SL journalists and YouTube.

Yeah, okay. So if anybody’s into the machine, that’s a really great way to get your stuff promoted out there. And some people like me to search on the second life keyword to see if you can find stuff that you speak. You can only find the very few that relates to second life with its keywords and tags. Now it’s just every day there’s tons of machine videos coming on to YouTube.

All right. So another way that you can start getting your business promoted out there is this upcoming search engine feature that the Linnons are building in to their existing search engine. I don’t know if they’re running on Google technology or something else for their search results, some trials of it.

Actually, they look pretty good. I prefer their new search engine over anything else that they’ve had because it searches across everything. Well, they were able to do that before, but there’s more relative content. It’s able to search against more items. You can now search against content in your profile, in your… …picts tab, which are often liked the most. This is important, these picts tabs, because the search engine goes on.

It tries to find out what links are the most credible. For example, my shop, The Gegrace Gadgets, does fairly well because I have gadgets in the title, description of the land, and there’s quite a few objects on it that have gadgets in their description. However, it doesn’t do as well when you search gadgets because there’s other people that have hardly any content on their profile, or hardly any content on the land description, but there’s a ton of people who added their location to their picts tab. This really helps them to gain rank over anybody else, regardless of how much metadata you put into your land.

The search engine goes for what people really believe and trust in the most. I think you’re going to start seeing a lot of people start advertising to their customers to at least add landmarks to their picts tab, or to be paid to do so, perhaps. A lot of people also have a lot of content on their land now that shows prices and descriptions.

Put a description into every object that you have out. I used to use network vendors, I still do. That’s primarily what I use, but now I have about 110 boxes of products that are laying out right now that actually serve one purpose. That is to get my search results to list more items that can be searched. Somebody might be searching for a message board display or a currency exchange display, all these items. They can’t find it in my vendors using the Second Life Search because it doesn’t go dig into them, but it does dig into any object laying out that you mark for search. That really helps me out there.

The other thing is you might be trying to use keywords a few times related to your shop, but you might want to also look into other keywords that are related to the original. Let me see. Classifieds, Profile, Courage Use of Pics. Keywords, Selector, Tools, and Ethosaurus. These are probably your most powerful tools that you can use because you can’t always think of what somebody is going to search every single thing that they’re going to search.

To think of it alone is just going to waste your time really. Ethosaurus is very helpful because you type in your keyword and it tells you, oh, the gadget is also a device. It can be a contraption.

It can be a gizmo, a doodag. There’s tons of alternate meanings that you can throw into your keywords. You don’t have to put all your keywords in your lands description either.

You can put it in your products. Your lands description is only limited to so many letters. It makes more sense to actually describe what you do in your land rather than throwing all those keywords in there because now they can be thrown into your products. Or just other prims that you don’t sell them but they’re there only for search. So yes, you can create a product. You can create a prim, reset, set it for, set up a subscription to help us show and search results. It doesn’t even have to be for sale.

It will tip you up. All right. The other thing is the keyword, Selector, Tools. These and the advertising industry.

One of them is by Overture. And let me see if I can find the link to that real quick. I could leave ahead on my Wiki. I’m going to just search for it real quick. Thanks. Oh, and if anybody’s interested, my Wiki is at degigmoriactwikispaces.com. And I’ll just type that real quick. Excuse me. But that is pretty much where I can show all my information and keep myself organized.

Okay. So Overture, I’ll copy this link location, has the ability to search about 12 months ago, one full month of what keywords people searched for besides the one that you type. And here’s the keyword suggestion tool link. inventory.overture .com slash these slash search, inventory slash suggestion.

If you type in Second Life, it’s going to return a ton of answers for you. Now, Overture has a problem. One, it’s slow.

And two, half the time it times out, it doesn’t work. It’s probably the best keywords you can find out there. There are paid keyword suggestion tools, but this one’s great. There are two other tools out there that I use. One is by Google.

And let me get that out here. Google has an ad word system. Right? So you can pretty much, they let you buy a word to display your ad with when people search for that word. And based on what word you want to buy, there’s competition.

And there might be three other people who want to have their advertising links show up at the same time as yours. Yes, the inventory is that the Overture link is down and up, down and up. And I’m not surprised that it’s down right now. It’s very unreliable as far as being up.

As far as results, it’s amazing. All right, so I’ll paste in the Google link at word.google .com slash select slash keyword tools, keyword tool external. This one has a captcha control in it so that you don’t. So it knows that you’re not a bot just fetching keywords from the sites. It’ll tell you if people are competing against your word and how many, what’s the level of competition.

I don’t know if that really matters to you or not. What matters to me is all those keywords. I love those keywords. And then there’s one other link that I have. And it’s at keyword discovery.com slash search.htm.

So that gives you a, I think it’s a list of the first 100 keywords that are relevant to your keyword. But you can go ahead and pay for a service if you want to. I do not. It’ll let you see more results. There’s all kinds of trends and stuff I see, but I don’t buy into that. Let me see. Okay. So are there any questions about search engine optimization at all? No questions.

Speaker 2: Okay. Looks like the audio feed is a little slow catching up.

Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. All right. I picked up my link up and. All right, we have a little delay here and or at least I do. And I’m going to stop playing it for me at least so I don’t hear myself double talk. Okay, so now that we’ve gone through search engine optimization and basically just trying to get your shop promoted and such. I think it’s time for a little audio song. And I found one from the pod safe music network. This is mine alone by REC. So we’ll just play that.

Speaker 3: Okay. So. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1: Okay. And that was my alone by REC on the pod safe music network. So this is the podcast I’ll try to remind people and I try and play a few songs here and there. So basically people can listen to what I like to listen to and maybe discover a few new things that they haven’t heard before. Okay, so next in my agenda here is there’s a there’s important I believe in the way that you present your business and everybody pretty much usually has a logo of some kind. And if not, I highly, highly suggest that you do be a logo because that’s how people start to identify your brand.

You’re they start to build in that that confidence that level of trust that because they see you everywhere they see it’s something they can identify. Okay, so this is my logo. After a logo you out to just find yourself a tagline. Some people confuse this with a phrase or a quote, but a tagline is very, very short three to five words.

The one that I’m going with is produce, present, prevail. It pretty much can identify my store alone or can identify what you can do with the items I saw in my store. So the tagline is really kind of to build, you know, an emotional association with with your with your products, what you can do with them. A theme is pretty, pretty important. You want to stick with the consistent theme. Now, most people usually get across their theme with using the same colors. You’ll probably notice that I often use the colors of blue, light, and I’ll use complimentary colors of black and green at times as well. But if you’ve seen my stores and my vendors in world, you’ll notice that they often have similar color scheme. And this goes with the idea of helping your store to get a branded. Sorry, my wife walked up here. This helps you start getting a branded presence in the second life that began people can start to identify with and understand who you are and what you’re doing.

Or at least it can help trigger that. Textures the same thing. You’ll notice I pretty much use one texture in this whole auditorium here.

It’s just a fading color really. Let me just res it here for you. And just select my texture. Bam. That’s it. That’s the most simplest texture I have. Oh, hey honey.

Speaker 2: You want to come? No. Okay, that’s fine.

Speaker 1: So I often use the same texture. I can play with it. You pretty much just do what you can. But find yourself, it doesn’t have to be a generic one like this. It could be, let me see. It could be an image or something, but I usually try and keep something that’s not too contrasting. So I can change it to different colors. So you can make it blue, green, yellow, purple, blue. You can easily change it. Same thing with noise. Here’s my noise texture.

And how I pass. There we go. Yeah, so this is still a pretty random texture. But you know, it pretty much tiles very well. And again, I use like a white and a light gray. You want to stick with the gray scale color scheme and just go from a light gray to a white.

And that pretty much lets you choose colors to assign to it so that you can change around very easily. Okay. Now I’m going to get rid of this little object.

I’ll just put it to the side. And using only one texture really helps on performance. Because I use gradient textures, gradient, and gradient is just a fading from one color to another. The actual size of the image, because it’s a lossy compression technology there, it’s not going to have that much effect on the quality of the image.

And it’s pretty much less light size to actually store that image with a lossy compression. Okay. Story line. Some stores actually have a story line associated with them.

This is really if you want to go out the distance. Some people can categorize this as a category of your story, like an overall theme. Or, you know, night stories also always like feature text stuff. Some people might be going in or, I don’t know, clothing, but you want to stick with the same story or category. You might actually have characters around your store.

So, I don’t know, maybe somebody wants to make a story based off of Strong Bad, and they’d have different sections for the coach or home star or somebody. But that’s really out there. But basically you want to stay within the same category. A mission statement. This comes on later down the road when you really start getting yourself set up, and then you want to start figuring out, okay, now that I’ve got some of these products, what is it that I want to let the customer know? What should they believe in, or not what they should believe in, but what do I want to let them know that I believe in? What are my core values and principles behind the things that I do?

What’s my drive and motivation? And it pretty much helps them to understand your point of view. It’s not exactly a profile, but more of an idea. And when you have your mission statement, you need to regularly either update it as you change, or you need to keep looking at it to make sure you’re still sticking within the boundaries of your mission statement so that you don’t keep redefining yourself the way that you originally want to stick with your values.

What’s next? Oh, I did mention that I had a website. I suggest that every business have a website of some kind, whether it be a blog or something, but mainly you only have a place where people can go to get information about your business, perhaps get support, and also see a list of the products that you have in your catalog. Without a website, the customers don’t really have a place to go except directly to you. And when you’re just one person alone, you don’t want to keep dealing with a lot of… You don’t want to keep having to tell people the same but to different people when you could just provide the information that they need to begin with.

Your customers need instant access to their answers, and a website will actually provide them that information. You could say, just let this person join your group. Well, A, people don’t like to join groups if their group lists are full.

And B, somebody has to be available to provide that information at the same exact time that they’re on and looking at your group. So stick with websites and try and keep your website with the theme as well. I think before I said these are just guidelines for me. My websites usually have the blue and white colors. I’m always working on them.

I think every website in the planet is a work in progress. We’ll have to see what goes on there. Headquarters. Make sure that your business… Oh, is somebody talking? No? Okay. There’s something as a finished website from Rockin’ Flashpart.

How very true. Okay. Headquarters. I suggest that people have a main store that everybody goes to. My headquarters is located right here in Woodbridge.

Basically, the headquarters that I provide helps people be immersed in my theme, in what I do, in my mission. So this is second life. We all know it’s fake, right? But it’s still a virtual world where we all want to feel that we’re included in some way in a different reality. And headquarters is your chance to provide a reality to your clients and your end customers.

So they feel like they’re really a part of what’s going on, or at least that they feel that something’s going on that they can see and interact with. Basically, my headquarters is full of not only gadgets in a showroom, but in a futuristic tech showroom, really. I’m still working on ways to get it to be more interactive with the people. So that interactivity really helps the people start to really gain the confidence and trustability in your site in a way. People in general just like to play. They like to touch things.

They like to see what happens. At least provide something that looks like it can be touched and actually responds to them when they touch it. It could be as simple as a computer that you touch and it gives out a no-car, or it could be as complex as whole services and whatnot. But keep it within a theme, so of your store. A lot of people actually have online indicators that are just green orbs they can touch, and then you can send them a message, or they can send you a message. Well, hey, that’s great, but does the green orb indicator look like it fits within your store’s theme, or does it stick out like a sore thumb?

If you have a music club with a green orb, it’d probably be better if you had a microphone or a computer on the side that looks like it fits within your environment, and then it can actually interact. Sister shops. A lot of people buy into a lot of different shops all over the grid to try and sell their products. And oftentimes, I’ll see a mall that all I see is vendor displays. And somebody spent five minutes to slap up a vendor, and then they left. Oh, yeah, and they paid the right box.

Well, hey, yes, that’s simple, that’s easy, it can be done. But what does that say about you? How does that keep you? How does that let you stick out from all the other vendors that are up there? As a different couple, they change the walls to be a different… That’s starting to help you set aside yourself to stand out against other vendors, because you’re actually competing with everybody there.

You want to grab those eyes to look at you. So what I often do is I not only change the colors and everything, but I don’t use the entire space. Like, what I mean is, I may be provided with a 10 by 10 area. That’s pretty much a box with a door to the mall. I don’t lay my floor down across the whole box. I only put my floor down, a part of the box, in the center. And then I’ll put vendors up, and instead of calling the whole mall, I’ll only call it part of the wall behind vendors.

And this serves as a purpose to not only get attention, but also to show that I’m trying to integrate myself into the environment in which my vendor was allowed to be placed. Let those nice blue floors show through. Let those walls with the decorations and such that everybody took the time to put up a scene. Other parts is, I’ll often put in a ceiling.

It may be crazy, but I do it. I put in a ceiling and I put in a light. And the lights actually go ahead and I take the time to actually go to the features. And I set it up as an actual light as well. This helps restore light up as you walk past, which is pretty awesome.

It’s just another way to grab more eyes because an eyeball is going to look at something light lit up inadvertently as they walk past and something inside may catch their eye. I often, as a gentle guideline, really, is I don’t use hover text. I keep all my textures 5 by 512. And even at that, they don’t really have that much content. There’s weight space all over. So it just helps it load quicker.

If you have a very detailed texture, it’s going to take more time just to load in general because the lossless compression that the second-life servers perform on those images needs to do a lot more work and take up more file size to get down to the customer. So that’s your potential customers. So, okay. I think I’ve pretty much gone through the business presentation aspect of things. Any questions here or anyone want to comment? If not, I’ll just keep talking. Wait a minute. That’s why I’m hearing it.

I hear typing. Keep going. So the next presentation is believe in yourself.

This is pretty important. Believing in yourself really helps provide confidence and credibility. People see that you believe in something and they tend to want to believe in people who believe in something. I mean, if you have two people, would you follow somebody who looks… You’re going to want to follow to somebody who actually can help you out. Believe in yourself, and along with that, you have to be passionate and enthusiastic about what it is you’re doing. I believe a lot of people already are.

Keep going, keep going. It might affect your slow here. Oh, okay, the battery is going to die soon. That’s fine.

I’ll keep going. Okay, so basically, a lot of people already believe in what they’re doing. They’re very passionate, enthusiastic about it. A lot of people wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. A lot of things I make are not because people want them, but because I will learn how to do it, or I enjoy doing it, or I want to find out different ways of doing something. That’s really amazing thing because people really love seeing that happen in people. They want to be just like that. And so they’ll start looking to you as a one model. That gives a perceived professionalism. And what I mean by perceived is, you may not really be professional. You may not feel like you’re professional, but people are going to see you as professional because you pretty much know the answers, or you have an agenda and a goal.

Another thing to help people, to help yourself really is provide testimonials and references. And this could simply be like when someone’s talking to you that you can say, yes, I’ve done such and such for this person, or I’ve done something for that person. And you’re actually providing references right there because they can actually go to that person and say, oh, the Patrick Moray, I’ve mentioned that you’ve built this little scripted buddy, scripted shoulder buddy. And they can say, oh yes, he helped me out very well. Or you can actually, instead of actually speaking to someone about what you’ve done for whom and why and what was involved, you can actually provide that reference in your website that I mentioned earlier.

So that people who may not have even thought to ask what are your references, you can actually provide that information anyway. And they’ll see that as additional professional characteristic of you and your service. You’re actually doing something for other people. There’s people who they can contact to verify and build a trustworthiness of your character and what you’re doing. Providing testimonials is practically the same thing.

Instead of them having to go to the person and asking how they feel about you, your end users can actually look right there at your website. However, they may still actually go and confirm with these people that yes, but what you said that they said is true. If anybody has written an essay before, you’ll know that you always have to put your reference, not quote, but you’ll always have to list your references at the end of any essay that you’re right. So the main reason for this is to pretty much prevent plagiarism. If you start throwing up testimonials on your website that somebody else had actually written but did not give you the, but said that they weren’t writing about you, you’re going to start to run into problems about plagiarism. So don’t put up testimonials that are not about you unless you’ve confirmed with the person that they really are about you. Guarantee of satisfaction. You know, this really is a part of believing in yourself because if you believe in yourself so well that you’re willing to guarantee that the person’s happy with the product.

And that sometimes really sells the people on what’s on that the product is actually worth investing into. If it is not to their satisfaction. Guarantee of satisfaction. You’re not advertising your guarantee of satisfaction.

So make sure to provide that information to the customer if they are not happy to let them to let you know or find out a way to work on arrangement with you so that they are happy. The last thing on the list here is industry associations. A lot of you may have heard of the Second Life Business Bureau or Better Business Bureau. And that’s pretty much taken off of the Real Life Better Business Bureau. So it’s kind of like a spin off.

I believe that they just changed their name recently. So let me see if I can find it here real quick. Let’s take a look at it for Google and… Well, you know what? I do have it in my profile. So I’ll just get a chance to log in my groups in… Where is it? S.L. Virtual World Business Bureau. That’s what it’s called. So if I go to Info,

Speaker 2: then I’ll get some notices and I’ll order by day in…

Speaker 1: Events for good news, dear board members. A great position in the Second Life Business Bureau to Virtual World Business Bureau. Everything is official now. I’m going to let everyone know if you have any notice. Okay. So the Virtual World Business Bureau will allow you. Thank you. The Virtual World Business Bureau is really a place where people can go to… If they have a dispute with your business in general, they can actually go to the Business Bureau and actually contact you through them.

Or just… I don’t know. It’s mostly for helping people resolve differences between you and your clients. It’s mostly just chatting right now, not chatting, but group notifications. But there is good news is there is a logo that they provide that you can put on your storefront somewhere and say, yes, I’m a member of the Virtual World Business Bureau and hey, I’m really willing to work through you, whether it’s one or one, or if it’s through this organization. It’s really a status saying, yes, I’m trying to be…

Yes, I am a member. Yes, you do have to pay. I think it’s like a thousand linens a year. I don’t know how long I’ve been in there, but they helped make me to pay up again.

Personally, I’ll just say this right now. I don’t really know what use it is other than having the ability to display the group tag in your profile and displaying a logo. Let me see if I can… If I have a logo, I can show you what it looks like. This is Bureau.

Maybe it’s SLDB. Okay, there’s the standards. Let’s see. You must be in business in the Bureau’s service area for not less than one month. Or such longer period of time is necessary to blah, blah, blah.

Okay, whatever. There’s a membership application and a fee, which I think was a thousand-hell dollars. You have to supply background information about your company, your principles, and other information.

I remember I had to put in a detailed description of who I was so people could understand. Properly respond to any and all complaints forwarded by the Bureau and make a good faith effort to resolve all such complaints. Yeah, it’s a good business practice. A lot of people already do that regardless of if they’re in the Bureau. The Bureau is mainly a stamp that the government has a guarantee that says, yes, this person will resolve differences with you if you have a problem. And if not, we’ll kick them out.

Let’s see. Complaint prevention. Corrupt rate with the Bureau in efforts to eliminate the underlying causes of patterns of customer complaints with the Bureau may cause the company’s attention. Self-regulation. You need to promote voluntary self-regulation within the business industry.

Refrain from using the name or logo for commercial sales or advertising purposes in any manner, not specifically. Oh, okay. Don’t listen to anything I said. I didn’t show you the logo anyway.

Property support the principles and purposes of Second Life Business Bureau. I’m not a gage in activity of fruit and flex. Let’s see. Oh, and here’s the cost as of April 1st, 2007. It was $1,000 annually.

Order $100 a month. Okay. Okay. So anyway, Business Bureau, I see it pretty much as a stamp of to let customers know that, yeah, you’re really going to make a good faith effort to actually go ahead and resolve any differences if they should run into any problems with your business.

And if you do not, then you will actually encounter some problems within the Business Bureau as reconciliation. Okay. Now, I think, I think we’ve been talking for a while now. I have a time. Let me go into the next part.

Was it? Okay. So this, I’m going to play a song for you from the Potsafe Music Network. And I guess I’m going to do Motherless Child, the place like home mix. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Love Spirals, but I know that the woman who sings in there actually has a Second Life account. So I’m going to go ahead and play this for you. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Speaker 3: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Speaker 1: Alright, and that was Love Spirals doing Motherless Child. You can go to lovespirals.com and there’s also a group in Second Life called Love Spirals, all one word. And the singer’s name is Angie B.

And she’s in Second Life as well and her name is Angie Riel. Alright, so let’s keep going. Not only is there a business presentation that you have put your concerns over, but product presentation really helps market your products. Because your products are usually the heart of your business and if not, I don’t know what is. Basically, keep a consistent theme across all products. Meaning you want to keep this theme to look like your business’ theme. And let me just grab something from my shop and just pull it over here for a second so you can see what I’m talking about.

If I can get it, let me select this thing. It’s false. Okay. Yes, that’s what it was.

I was a little too far away. Okay. And you’ll notice that I’m bringing over a slideshow that keeps changing.

Okay, I’ll just put it over there. But you’ll notice like each product that I have in this little slideshow here, they look like they’re from the same vendor. You’ll notice that I have the same color scheme.

I have the same basic elements. The fonts are always the same. There’s just everything’s the same except for the images themselves and the description. You want to keep something that’s the same because this helps, again, to keep consistent for branding. You want to keep letting people identify with your products very quickly and your store. If someone sees a product and doesn’t know that it’s with your store, you’ve lost out on potential advertising there.

The strength of branding has been lost. You’ll notice a couple of my pictures used to not do anything at all. They were just simple screenshots I took in a second life. That was the old stuff. But the new stuff, everything’s more professional, I would say. There’s that credibility that you’re putting an effort to put quality into the products that you’re selling. Now, you want to keep it professional and that kind of contradicts what I was saying is that the consistent theme makes it professional.

Yes, but you also don’t want to… I’m trying to think of how I want to phrase what it is I’m trying to phrase. Let’s just say that you want to make sure you’re spelling correctly. You want to make sure that you’re using the right words, that your grammar’s correct.

You don’t want to misspell things. Let’s just say that if you’re looking at an image of a product, you want to make it look like something you would see out of a catalog in real life. You want to see that someone is really putting a business-oriented effort into this product because if the product does not look professional, the customer does not have a level of trust in that product that it will work exactly how the product advertises that it will work. There’s a communication effort going on there.

This image here is trying to say, hey, not only do I do this, but the person who made me… There’s not really… It just loses a lot of information. Yes, it does show what the product looks like, but that’s all it shows. The picture is worth a thousand words, but it could be worth a million if you really put in the effort. Most of my products you’ll see that I always identify the name of the product, except people know what to look for. If they get something in their inventory, they’ll know what happened. No. I thought that was my sound person leaving.

Speaker 2: Okay, I will give you a copy of the presentation slides. Hopefully we can wait until after the conference though, because right now I’m kind of in the middle of a conference. Okay, all right.

Speaker 2: Okay, tell you what, I’ll just give them to you right now. So let me see if I can do this or not. Can I hand you a multiple items? Oh no, if you don’t get those slides, let me know. If it’s just one, let me know which one you got. Just one. No.

Yeah, you know what? Tell you what, I’ll build a box. I’ll make this easy for everybody. And I’ll throw them in here. There we go. And I need to make these copyable, don’t I? One moment, I’m getting to it. I’ll get properties. And I’ll say copy.

Speaker 2: Copy. Was it control W, does it? Copy, control W. Copy, control W. Let’s see.

Speaker 1: This is hard to set permissions for multiple items, isn’t it? Okay. There are only nine slides right now. And let’s see, I’ll say it’s for sale for zero L dollars. And everybody gets a copy and everybody can modify copy. And, all right. Buy that if you wish, and I’ll just say buy object. And I’ll say blue, hair, number 14 slides. Okay.

Speaker 2: And let’s see, edit, texture. And I’ll just go over the slides. Okay, it’s ready.

Speaker 1: Okay. So, as I was saying, you want to identify your product name. The purpose of your product, it’s kind of important because the picture might not actually display it. All right, you’re welcome. Good night to you. Okay.

Very, very cool. Okay. I should try and just move to the rest of these though. All right, thank you. Have a good night and come back sometime.

Make up. Add this place to your pics. Or at least go to my store and add it to your pics. Get me up in the search engines. All right, good night. Okay. All right. Yes, literally this word of mouth here. Or no, word of mouth and word of chat.

Okay, so let’s try and get through the rest of these quickly since I think everybody else needs to get going. You want to identify your product name. You want to identify its purpose as a very brief summary.

Very brief. You’ll notice I say let the slides with blint. You’ll let people know what exactly it does, why they would need to use it. Provide brand identification. All right, that’s the last one. You’ve got to let me know where your blog is or is it unless it’s at some of something. I’ll take a look at that again. All right, provide brand identification. And this is just simply putting your logo there that logo lets people know, hey, this is the person who made it or there’s the company. And behind that, the theme comes in of cross also to provide brand identification.

So because not only is my logo there, but the colors, the the the the layout in a sense is coming across all of them that is coming with my store. Okay, provide information to come and questions. Come and questions are how many prims in it? What are the permissions? Can I copy? Can I modify? You know, I always put in my images, you know, five prims you can modify, you can copy. If scripts are not modified, but the object is, you want to let them know in some kind of way that yeah, you can modify the the object. However, there’s a little catch there that that’s not going to put you modify everything, but you can modify the prints. All right, that’s why it’s done with.

I think we’ll go to the next one. That’s quick. Okay, product details. Most vendors will allow you to provide a no card with your products when they display. Not only that, but you probably want to provide the details on your website as well.

I mean, a no card can only provide so much information in a certain format. You may want to link to other products that you sell or reference things. So go with the website as well. I do both.

I actually start out with my website, then I copy all the content from the website and just paste it in my no card. Bam, that part’s done. So I’m not actually doing things twice. It’s just that the website allows me to keep up to data information available while the users may actually get updated information in no card.

However, it’s a no card usually in some way provides them a link to the website where they can find more information. Okay, viral marketing. This is what all the real life advertisers love to have happen. Vow marketing is when somebody tells their friend and their friend tells somebody else and their friend tells somebody else. Another stranger tells somebody else and 500,000 billion, cajillion, zillion, million people tell somebody people that eventually gets up on ABC News or CNN or something.

I don’t know. Basically, you want to allow your debt no card to have full permissions to copy, modify, transfer, or at least to copy. At least copy.

Let me think about it. There’s nothing really that you want to prevent your user from copying it for any reason because that no card is an advertisement. It’s an advertisement that you sell a specific product. And if you’ve written it right, it’ll be an advertisement with the landmark to your store, description of your store, title of name of your store, and also a brief summary of other products that you sell. Now, with all my products, I always give out two no cards.

I give out one no card specifically about my store and another no card about the product itself. So, again, let me just remind people, these are only guidelines. So I’m still learning here and I believe everybody else is learning as well. Some of these things just make more sense. Some of them don’t.

I try different things. The problem with putting your source information in with the product information is a simple fact that information may get updated about your source information. So, in my store, these are just a provider separate no card for it. And people may just want to give their friends the no card specifically about your store rather than your product. Okay, research products in real life. And basically what I mean by this is I sell a notification system that allows people, allows me to get notified every time someone walks in my shop.

That’s great. I could have just simply said, hey, there’s a notification system. However, I went and started researching real life notification systems and found out that there are a lot of features and key words that I could have been throwing into there with my product descriptions. Basically, I start advertising. I start working with it to advertise it as an actual product in real life, but still with a hint that it is a fake product. Let me see if I can find this real quick. So it was a visit or notifier info.

Okay, there we go. So I started adding some things. Listen to some of these features.

Compact and reliable early alert system. That I love many to set up options on owner touch. Well, that’s second one’s pretty much second one for me.

This one, no wiring, complete kit, installs in seconds. An ounce the inert has ability to play a time when someone walks through the beam or remain silent. Unaffected by sunlight. Of course it’s unaffected by some light.

There’s no not really such a thing as sunlight and second light, but you start getting an idea about how I’m trying to put this virtual immersion idea into my products by researching what the product is dealing with your life. And so keep within the honesty of what the product does. I mean, say product uses 13. The votes or something in order to operate because you know it just is a real environment that does take energy.

So, you know, it’s something that takes 13 bills. You know that there could be environmental issues that people start complaining about. So be careful when you start describing what features your products have when trying to present them with real life feature advertisements. But you know still keeping that ability to let the customer believe in that virtual immersion theory that they’re in second life, which really is a virtual world. I think people enjoy the fact that you actually say things present things as a real thing, but still keep it within reasonable limits.

All right. And last thing about product details is the try and document everything you can about the product. There’s a ton of things I document on any new product that I make.

And mainly this is not only for search engine optimization on my website, but it’s also to provide again answers every question somebody may have, or even to hit at features that may even impress them. So you got your name summary description. Summary I usually consider as the very short line of text that may float over a vendor at one time or be whispered out when somebody clicks something. And usually the summary appears right there on my product descriptions image also. So summary is very short. Description actually goes in detail about what the product does. Features gives can usually summarize what the description just went ahead and said, but may actually give about a lot of information as well that wasn’t in the description. Primitive count. It’s important permissions.

They create it. I pretty much provide this for my own reference just so I can realize how old things were how old I am. Because I believe my hair will start to be gray in a while here, but I have to keep dyeing it blue. And it looks okay and vibrant.

And I look a lot right now. Version history. I like to provide version history so that people know what changes I’ve made and that I’m still actively providing it still.

If there is a problem, he’s letting it all have fixes. Also background history. If somebody goes ahead and asked me for a solution or I work on a solution for them to answer a problem. I usually try and document who it was and why I did something because not only friends, but just to allow people to know that I am working with people, that I am listening to my customers and that I’m providing valuable feedback and updates for them. So it’s again that build of credibility and trust and professionalism. You really want to go after that.

Then you go after that by being very open about what you’re doing. And then keywords. If you’re doing a product on the website, usually throwing in keywords at the end will help get your product out there.

Once it’s searching, it has to be turned up. Plus my wiki does tagging so I can see a keyword cloud. Okay.

Now, the next thing I want to talk about is freebies. And I’m not sure if that’s the last thing blue here. No, this is the second to last slide.

So we have two slides. So freebies. Freebies are good and bad. The big thing about freebies is a lot of people grab it not. So a lot of people can see your name.

So you’re seeing in the community as someone who’s contributing. Oh my gosh. I’m talking too much.

Okay. Basically, I like to be, if you provide freebies, in their, they’re actually very good freebies like it painted out. Yes, freebies become a way to advertise that you make stuff.

Well, it’s not really just the logo. But the main thing that I trust is the, if you look at the properties of any object, you can see who originally created it. And with freebies, that’s really where the importance is because if somebody, I don’t know, you’re down the line, finds something by you. And they think it’s amazing, but they want to get help on how to do something, even though you may provide open source to your scripts, they may contact you. I actually have a lot of people who have contacted me in the past, either with simply a compliment or asking how to do something or asking me if I can do something else for them like a scripting job.

Because, no, if you do it open source, then that gives them the ability to see how is it that you code. Do you actually provide comments with your code? Do you use methods and features that are very optimized?

Are you very good against resources? And so it’s more like a very small demonstration of a portfolio of your work. And some of the freebies that I have, they’re very complex in nature, but they’ve all been documented fairly well. And they take so many advantages of some scripting features that people start to learn from them. And this is another part of the contribution to the community.

If people start to learn from your objects of how to script very good, then you start improving the world in which you live in in general, because those people who may have potentially scripted things to take up high resources don’t, because they see how they can do it in a more efficient way. Alright, so viral marketing effect, if you’re giving out a freebie, I don’t see why there would be a problem putting a transfer copy permission on them. Unless it’s like a limited freebie that you’re only giving out, I don’t know, 10 copies to the first few people that come to your store. But transfer copy is kind of expected for freebies, because you want to let people hand them out to their friends and their friends and their friends. That’s the whole purpose of viral marketing, is to let the information flow, the liquidity of your objects and prints in your work really advertises of what you can do. The problem I find with freebies though is the perceived value of your object is the crease. People don’t feel that it’s worth as much, or they don’t feel that it’s as, the quality is as much. And this is primarily because the majority of freebies out there are just horrible, or just very lame. So if you intend to give out your items to freebies, don’t be surprised if a lot of people don’t even look at them or…

I just muted myself. Okay, a lot of people don’t look at their freebies, they just get them and forget them about them. A lot of people will look at the freebie and figure that they can modify it and resell it. Or some people just go ahead and resell the thing altogether. People don’t really care about the owner who created the freebie. I’m not saying everybody, but there are a few people out there who will have total disregard for you in the time that you put in making this item. And just go ahead and throw it on the market or change just a letter in the line of code and resell it and say, hey, it’s there as they made the script. Other people may just copy the text of the script and paste it in another object so it looks like they originally created the script. You’ve got some issues to weigh against there, whether or not you want to make a freebie or not. And then there’s the potential that if somebody gets a hold of the script in an object that you made as creator and you give them full permissions, they can essentially just change the contents of the script to be a great attack of some kind and I will send your names on there. So be aware of the consequences of distributing freebies.

All right. So last thing is networking. And I’ve already touched on viral marketing and word of mouth, but part of advertising your business is you’ve got to make use of these groups that are in second life. I’ve really avoided groups myself until probably about a month ago, maybe groups really let people communicate with you and not only that, but you can actually send out your message to them. My group personally is very, there’s not much chat at all unless I initiate it or if I invite somebody and they just say hello to the group. The primary purpose of my group I often find is that I send out a message every time I create a new product, every time I create an update for a product and for this event this weekend.